All the King's Men (70 page)

I went back down into the street. The fact that the car was there was funny. He had abandoned it. Where in the hell did a man go off in the rain, on foot, this time of day? Or night, rather?–for it was dusk now.

I thought of the bars. For it is a tradition that a man, when he has received a great shock, heads for a bar, puts his foot on the rail, orders five straight whiskies in a row, downs then one after another while he stares with uncomprehending eyes at the white, tortured face in the mirror opposite him, and then engages the bartender in a sardonic conversation about Life. But I couldn’t see Adam Stanton playing that game. But I went to the bars, anyway.

That is, I went to a lot of them. A lifetime isn’t long enough to go to all the bars in our city. I began with Slade’s place, had no luck, asked Slade to try to hang on to Dr. Stanton if he came in, and then moved through the other establishments of chromium, glass bricks, morros, colored lights, comfy Old English worm-eaten oak, sporting prints, comic frescoes, or three-piece orchestras. Around seven-thirty I called up Adam’s office and then the hospital again. He wasn’t at either place. When they told me that at the hospital, I said I was calling for Governor Stark, whose son was there as a patient of Dr. Stanton, and could they please try to dig up something. They came back with the report that Dr. Stanton had been expected well before seven, that he had had an appointment with another doctor to examine some plates, but that he had not come. They had been unable to locate him at his office or at home. Would I like to leave a message for Dr. Stanton when he came in? I said, yes, to have him get in touch with me at the earliest possible moment, it was important. I would leave word at my own hotel as to my whereabouts.

I went back to my hotel and had a meal in the coffee shop, having left word at the desk to page me if a call came. But none came. So I dawdled in the lobby with the evening papers. The
Chronicle
_ had a long editorial lauding the courage and sound sense of the handful of men in the Senate who were making a fight against the administration’s tax bill, which would throttle business and enterprise in the state. There was a cartoon opposite the editorial. It showed the Boss, or rather, a figure with the Boss’s head but a great swollen belly, dressed in a Buster Brown suit with the little pants tight above great hairy thighs. On one knee the monster balanced a big pudding and from the gaping hole in the top had just plucked a squirming little creature. The pudding bore the label
The State
_ and the squirming little creature the label
Hardworking Citizen
_. From the mouth of the Boss’s head came one of those balloons of words the comic-strip artists use to indicate the speech of their characters. It said: “Oh, what a good boy am I!” Under the cartoon was the caption:
Little Jack Horner
_.

I read on down through the editorial. It said that our state was a poor state, and could not bear the burden thus tyrannically imposed upon it. That was an old one. Every time the Boss had cracked down–income tax, mineral-extraction tax, liquor tax, every time–it had been the same thing. The pocketbook is where it hurts. A man may forget the death of the father, but never the loss of the patrimony, the cold-faced Florentine, who is the founding father of our modern world, said, and he said a mouthful.

This is a poor state, the opposition always screamed. But the Boss said: “There is a passel of pore folks living in it and no mistake, but the state isn’t poor. It is just a question of who has got his front feet in the trough when slopping time comes. And I aim to do me some shoving and thump me some snouts.” And he had leaned forward to the crowd, with the shagged-down forelock and the bulging eyes, and had lifted his right arm to demand of them and of the hot sky, “Are you with me? Are you with me?” And the roar had come.

More money for graft, the opposition always screamed. “Sure,” the Boss had said, lounging easy, “sure, there’s some graft, but there’s just enough to make the wheels turn without squeaking. And remember this. There never was a machine rigged up by man didn’t represent some loss of energy. How much energy do you get out of a lump of coal when you run a steam dynamo or a locomotive compared to what there actually is in that lump of coal? Damned little. Well, we do a hell of a lot better than the best dynamo or locomotive ever invented. Sure, I got a bunch of crooks around here, but they’re too lily-livered to get very crooked. I got my eye on ‘em. And do I deliver the state something? I damned well do.”

The theory of historical costs, you might put it. All change costs something. You have to write off the costs against the gain. Maybe in our state change could only come in the terms in which it was taking place, and it was sure due for some change. The theory of the moral neutrality of history, you might call it. Process as process is neither morally good nor morally bad. We may judge results but not process. The morally bad agent may perform the deed which is bad. Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

The theory of historical costs. The theory of the moral neutrality of history. All that was a high historical view from a chilly pinnacle. Maybe it took a genius to see it. To really see it. Maybe you had to get chained to the high pinnacle with the buzzards pecking at your liver and lights before you could see it. Maybe it took a genius to see it. Maybe it took a hero to act on it.

But sitting there in the lobby, waiting for the call which did not come, I was willing to let those speculations rest. I went back to the editorial. That editorial was shadow-boxing, all right. It was shadow-boxing, for at the very minute it was just as likely true as not that the vote was being called up in the Capitol, and it would take the winged hosts to make the vote different from what it was going to be after the MacMurfee boys had talked themselves out and the count was called.

It was around nine o’clock when I was paged. But it wasn’t Adam. It was a message from the Capitol saying the Boss was there and wanted me to come up. I left word at the desk that if Dr. Stanton should call me, he was to be asked to call the Capitol, I would leave instructions with the operator on the switchboard there. Then I ran up Anne to give her the news, or rather, the no-news, about my efforts to date. She sounded calm and tired. I went out to my car. It had been raining again, for the gutter by the curb was running with a black stream which gleamed like oil in the lights of the street. But it had let up now.

When I pulled into the Capitol grounds I saw that the place was pretty well lit up. But that wasn’t surprising, even at that hour, when the Legislature was in session. And when I got inside, the place was certainly not uninhabited. The solons had broken up shop for the evening and were milling about in the corridors, especially at those strategic points where the big brass spittoons stood. And there were plenty of other people around, too. There were a lot of reporters, and herds of bystanders, those people who love to have the feeling that they are around when something big is happening.

I worked through the place and up to the Boss’s office. They told me there that he had gone down with somebody to the Senate.

“There wasn’t any hitch about the tax bill passing, was there? I asked the girl.

“Don’t be silly,” the girl said.

I started to tell her that I had been around there back when she was lying in the crib sucking her thumb, but didn’t do it. Instead, I asked her to take care of the business of Adam’s call for me, and went down to the Senate.

At first I didn’t spot the Boss. Then I saw him off to one side, with a couple of the Senators and Calvin Sperling and discreetly in the background several other men, just hangers-on who were warming their hands at the blaze of greatness. Over to one side of the Boss, I saw Sugar-Boy lounging against the marble wall, with his cheeks drawn in to suck the sugar cube which, at that moment no doubt, was dissolving its bliss down his gullet. The Boss stood with his hands clasped behind him and his head hanging a little forward. He was listening to something one of the Senators was telling him.

I approach the group and stood back from it, waiting. In a minute I caught the Boss’s eye and knew that he had seen me. So I went over to Sugar-Boy and said, “Hello.”

He managed to get the word out after several efforts. The he resumed work on the sugar. I leaned against the wall beside him, and waited.

Four or five minutes passed, and the Boss still stood there with his head hanging forward, listening. He could listen a long time and not say a word, just let the fellow our it out. The stuff would pour out and pour out, and the Boss would just be waiting to see what was in the bottom of the bucket. Finally, I knew that he had enough. He knew what was in the bottom of the fellow’s bucket or that there wasn’t anything there, after all. I knew that he had had enough, for I saw him suddenly lift his head up sharp and look straight at the man. That was the sign. I stopped leaning against the wall. I knew the Boss was ready to go.

He looked at the man and shook his head. “It won’t wash,” he said in a perfectly amiable fashion. It was loud enough for me to hear. The other fellow had been talking low and fast.

Then the Boss looked over at me and called, “Jack.”

I went to him.

“Let’s get upstairs,” he said to me, “I want to tell you something.”

“O. K.,” I said, and started toward the door.

He left the men and followed me, catching up with me at the door. Sugar-Boy fell in just on his other side and a little back.

I started to ask the Boss how the boy was, but thought better of it. It was just a question of the kind of badness, and there wasn’t any use asking about that. So we moved on through the corridor to the big lobby, where we would take an elevator up to his office. Some of the men lounging along the corridor stepped back a little and said, “Howdy-do, Governor,” or “

“Hi, Boss,” but the Boss only bowed his response to the greetings. The other men, those who said nothing, turned their heads to watch the Boss as he passed. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about all that. He must have passed down that corridor a thousand times, or near that many, with men calling out to him, or saying nothing and following with their eyes his progress over the glittering marble.

We came out into the great lobby, under the dome, where there was a blaze of light over the statues which stood with statesmanlike dignity on pedestals to mark the quarters of the place, and over the people who moved about in the area. We walked along the east wall, toward the inset where the elevators were. Just as we approached the statue of General Moffat (a great Indian fighter, a successful land speculator, the first governor of the state), I noticed a figure leaning against the pedestal.

It was Adam Stanton. I saw that his clothes were soaked and that mud and filth were slopped up his trousers half to the knees. I understood the abandoned car. He had walked away from it, in the rain.

Just as I saw him, he looked in our direction. But his eyes were on the Boss, not on me. “Adam,” I said, “Adam!”

He took a step toward us, but still did not look at me.

Then the Boss veered toward Adam, and thrust out his hand in preparation for a handshake. “Howdy-do, Doctor,” he began, holding out his hand.

For an instant Adam stood there immobile, as though about to refuse to shake the hand of the man approaching him. Them he put out his hand, and as he did so I felt a surge of relief and thought:
He’s shaking hands with him, he’s all right now, he’s all right
_.

Then I saw what was in his hand, and even as I recognized the object, but before the significance of the recognition had time to form itself in my mind and nerves, I saw the two little spurts of pale-orange flame from the muzzle of the weapon.

I did not hear the report, for it was lost and merged with the other more positive staccato series of reports, on my left. With his right arm still extended Adam reeled back a step, swung his reproachful and haggard gaze upon me and fixed it, even as a second burst of firing came and he spun to the floor.

In the astonishing silence, I rushed toward Adam as he fell. Then I heard somewhere in the lobby a woman begin screaming, then a great rush of feet and babble of voices. Adam was bleeding heavily. He was stitched across the chest. The chest was all knocked in. He was already dead.

I looked up to see Sugar-Boy standing there with the smoking automatic in his hand, and off to the right, near the elevator, a highway patrolman with a pistol in his hand.

I didn’t see the Boss. And thought:
He didn’t hit him
_.

But I was wrong. Even as I thought that and looked around, Sugar-Boy dropped his automatic clattering to the marble, and uttering some strangled, animal-like sound, rushed back beyond the statue of Governor Moffat.

I laid Adam’s head back on the marble and went beyond the statue. I had to shove the people back now, they were crowding so. Somebody was yelling, “Stand back, stand back, give him air!” But they kept crowding up, running to the spot from all over the lobby and from the corridors.

When I broke through, I saw the Boss sitting on the floor, breathing heavily, staring straight ahead. He had both hands pressed to his body, low on the chest and toward the center. I could see no sign that he was hit. Then I saw a very little ooze of blood between two of the fingers, just a little.

Sugar-Boy was leaning above him, weeping and sputtering, trying to speak. He finally managed to get out the words: “D-d-d-d-does it hur-hur-hur-hurt much, Boss–does it hur-hur-hur-hurt?”

The Boss did not die there in the lobby under the dome. In fact, he lived quite a while and died on a clean, white, antiseptic bed, with all the benefits of science. For a couple of days it was given out that he would not die at all. He was seriously wounded–there were two little.25-caliber slugs in his body, slugs from a little toy target pistol Adam had had since he was a kid–but an operation was possible, and he was a very strong man.

So there was all over again the business of the waiting room with the potted plants and water colors and artificial logs on the cozy hearth. A sister of Lucy Stark came with Lucy the morning of the operation. Old Man Stark, the Boss’s father, was too feeble to leave Mason City. You could see that Lucy’s sister, a woman a good deal older than Lucy, dressed in country black with high-laced black kid shoes, was a strong-minded, sensible woman who had been through a lot and knew how to help somebody else through. You could look at her squarish, slightly reddened, coarse-skinned hands, with their square-cut nails, and know that she knew how to take hold. When she entered the waiting room there at the hospital and cast a practiced and critical, not quite scornful, glance over the potted plants and the artificial logs, it was like a pilot mounting to the pilothouse and taking over.